Preparation and processing of presentation documents (e.g., slideshows, “decks”, or “pitches” created with Microsoft® PowerPoint® or similar software) can be extremely burdensome for enterprises, especially ones servicing large numbers of clients and pitching numerous potential clients. Just by way of example, there may be many different versions of a presentation for a financial institution to explain its products and services to institutional investors. If a senior executive requests a presentation directed to a particular type of institutional investor—college endowments, for example—the junior executive tasked with the assignment may have to review many existing presentations in order to pick and choose slides to go into the new presentation. This is particularly a challenge if either executive is using a portable device or mobile device with memory and processing limitations. For example, Microsoft® PowerPoint® files can be many megabytes in size so that accessing five, ten or twenty of such presentations using a tablet may not be practical or even possible in some cases. Memory size can limit the number of presentations that can be loaded. Processing and display constraints can make it difficult to switch or toggle between different presentations. In some cases, tablet or other portable devices may not provide software adequate to access certain types of presentation formats. For example, there is currently no fully-functional Microsoft Office suite for Android® devices or Apple iOS® devices. While there are alternative apps that purport to allow access to Microsoft® PowerPoint® files (e.g., Apple's Keynote® application, Polaris® Office, QuickOffice®, Documents to Go®, etc.), they tend to have limited utility and can be unreliable.
Senior executives have their own challenges with existing approaches to creating new presentations. For many, their practice for initiating a new presentation is to print out their old pitches and add hand-written notes before handing them to the junior executive. This approach become more and more archaic as technology has advanced. Senior executives travel with advanced mobile devices like tablets, but often do not have the tools to put those devices to effective use when it comes to creating or editing presentations. Furthermore, hard copies and hard-written notes are difficult to share among collaborators and even more difficult to organize or preserve for future projects.
What is needed is a system and method for an enterprise to allow mobile users to access presentation files, edit presentation files, and/or create new or updated presentation files in an efficient and practical manner that is consistent with the constraints on portable computing devices, system bandwidth considerations, configuration control, and security considerations.
Other problems and drawbacks also exist.